Katherine May: “Wintering is… those times when we feel cut off from the rest of the world”

The writer Katherine May believes we should all embrace our personal winters.

She isn’t talking about the coldest season of the year though. For her, wintering is “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”

In her book, Wintering, May recounts her own year-long journey through winter, sparked by a sudden illness in her family that plunged her into a time of uncertainty and seclusion.

When life felt at its most frozen, she managed to find strength and inspiration from the incredible wintering experiences of others as well as from the remarkable transformations that nature makes to survive the cold.

In the latest episode of The Women’s Podcast, May talks to Róisín Ingle about why wintering is so important, the events around her 40th birthday which led to her wintering with her husband and son, and her diagnosis of autism as an adult.